Tracking your contacts and conversations isn’t the only task a CRM is good for. Choosing the right CRM with powerful reporting capabilities can save you a ton of time in analyzing your sales numbers and creating your financial forecasts for the future.
A study by IBM found that the ability to consolidate sales data was one of the top four most important features that businesses wanted out of a CRM. These tools help gather and organize customer data and offer invaluable insights into your audience, shaping your business strategies.
But, not all CRMs are built the same. Some CRMs offer better reporting features than others, so choosing the right CRM can impact everything from your sales process to your productivity.
In this article, we’ll examine the CRMs with the best reporting capabilities, the key CRM reports you should monitor, and the valuable insights each one can provide.
A CRM report is a tool within your CRM platform that provides you with different datasets in an easy-to-read format for analysis. The data present in these reports is derived from sales and marketing activities recorded in your CRM.
This reporting tool allows CRM users to draw custom reports for deeper data evaluation, helping businesses pinpoint trends and opportunities. Generating CRM reports regularly will enable sales and marketing managers to keep track of their most important KPIs to ensure their teams meet monthly, quarterly, and annual business goals.
Sales and marketing teams can create CRM reports in the form of graphs, charts, and more, making data analysis easier.
How CRM reports benefit businesses
While you might already have a handle on several critical aspects of your organization, analyzing your customer, sales, and marketing data will truly reveal the effectiveness of your current processes.
In fact, leaning on CRM reporting for deeper operational insights can provide significant business benefits, including:
Assess overall performance: Drawing reports from your CRM system gives you an overview of sales and rep performance, which you can then analyze and benchmark.
Increase team efficiency: With CRM reports, you can quickly identify roadblocks and ensure team members are on the same page, helping them move forward toward their goals more efficiently.
Promote data-driven decisions: CRM reporting opens the door to deeper data analysis, revealing insights teams and managers can use for more strategic decision-making.
Improve customer experiences: Your reports organize customer data in a way that offers a greater understanding of customer trends and behavior, allowing you to optimize sales, marketing, and service strategies.
Determine your ICP: Using the data from your reports, you’ll be able to identify characteristics related to leads that have the highest conversion potential and use it to develop your ideal customer profile.
6 CRMs with the best reporting features
Discover our selection of the top six CRMs known for their exceptional reporting features. These platforms offer powerful analytics to help you make informed decisions and boost productivity.
1. Nutshell
Nutshell’s reporting is all about one thing: customization.
The CRM’s custom reporting features let sales teams easily find the sales insights that are most important to them and filter the data by a wide range of variables.
Nutshell’s Sales report is designed to help sales teams know where they stand, providing a quick yet comprehensive insight into overall sales performance and how your team performs compared to previous periods.
Nutshell’s robust suite of reporting tools also gives sales teams up-to-the-minute data on:
New Leads: How many new leads is your team adding, and where are they coming from? This report sheds light on your team’s prospecting performance and how successful your marketing is.
Losses: Analyze lost deals to determine when and why you’re not winning new business.
Forecast: This report tells you the overall value of your pipeline, your projected sales, and whether or not your team is on track to make its quota.
Activity: Want to know if your team is putting in the right effort to turn leads into paying customers? This report shows you the amount of customer touches they’re making and whether or not those touches are leading to sales.
Funnel: This report shows you the number of leads at each stage of your pipeline and how well they are moving between stages, allowing you to identify and address any bottlenecks.
Custom: This allows you to prepare and save a report based on a wide range of filtering criteria to meet your specific needs.
Snapshots: These are a collection of charts that offer daily trend information on your business’s health and show how your pipeline growth, win rate, and sales cycle length have evolved over time.
You can even break down your reports to see which of your sales reps is closing the most deals:
If you need a CRM with reporting features that can adapt to your business and uncover actionable insights from any corner of your sales activities, Nutshell should be your first look.
Price: Starting at $16 monthly for Nutshell’s Foundation plan, which includes comprehensive sales and new leads reports. Nutshell’s Pro plan is $42 per month and includes all the Foundation plan reporting, including snapshots, activity, losses, funnel, and custom reports).
Reporting & analytics in Nutshell
Learn more about Nutshell’s reporting and analytics features
Copper’s reporting capabilities are built around reaching goals. Inside their CRM reporting dashboard is a separate “goals” dashboard so sales managers can monitor and help their teams meet quotas.
It works like this. Sales managers set target goals for their sales reps, and then they track their team’s progress in the dashboard. Sales managers can set up a bunch of different goals aimed at:
Sales revenue: How many deals are closed in a certain period
Won opportunities: The number of opportunities a team wins in a certain period
Lead Conversions: The number of leads a team converts in a certain period
Activities: The number of actions a sales team completes in a certain period
The CRM’s reporting features aren’t only about goal setting. Sales teams can also forecast their expected sales and compare them to their actual sales to see if they’re on track. The CRM does this by measuring the overall value of opportunities a sales team has won and adding them to a weighted value of open opportunities still in the team’s pipeline.
Price: The Basic Copper plan starts at $23 a month and includes basic and sales reporting. The Business plan, on the other hand, costs $99 a month and includes activity reports, lead and sales insights, and goal tracking.
NetHunt CRM is perfect for reporting if your sales team lives in G Suite.
Although it’s not the most well-known CRM on our list, NetHunt is worth a shout-out. It integrates with Gmail and Google apps and allows you to add filters to your reports.
This means you can build any kind of report imaginable. Sales teams can pull figures from quotes, lead numbers, and overall revenue to see their performance from any angle.
And because all the data is pulled from G Suite, your team doesn’t have to input any extra numbers. The CRM draws figures from your actual work.
The report builder works on filters. This allows teams to find the data they’re looking for not only by one criterion but multiple values.
For example, let’s say you need to see where all your deals are in the negotiation and proposal stage, which are labeled as a “critical” priority. All you need to do is adjust your filters in your Sales pipeline, and you’ll have the information pulled up instantly:
NetHunt is a great CRM for teams that don’t want to overcomplicate tasks. They live in Gmail, and they just need to get things done.
Price:A free plan is available. NetHunt’s Business plan starts at $48 a month and gives you the above features plus campaign analytics and access to integrations like Zapier.
4. Pipedrive
If you want advanced forecasting in your CRM’s reporting features, Pipedrive should be on your radar.
From the CRM’s dashboard, you can split your sales team’s efforts by conversion rates, progress, and deals won (or lost) over a quarter, six-month, or yearly period.
Once you have the numbers in front of you in Pipedrive, it’s easier to see where your sales team is experiencing bottlenecks and which sales reps are struggling to close more than others. You can also break reports down by individual reps:
Or by a custom period:
Once you know where each rep stands and how the quarter is shaping up, you can use Pipedrive’s advanced sales forecasting tool to ensure your team stays on track.
The CRM will examine your reps’ likelihood of closing future deals (based on historical data) and consider which deals the team has already closed. Then, it’ll produce a revenue forecast so your company knows how much budget it has to work with.
Price: Free trial. Pipedrive’s Essential package starts at $12 monthly, giving you basic access to activity reports and sales goals. However, if you want to access the CRM’s cumulative revenue forecast, it’s only available on the $49 per month Professional plan.
Would it even be a list of top CRMs if we didn’t mention Salesforce? Salesforce has behemoth-sized reporting features that offer endless customization. Using its suite of reporting tools, you’ll be able to answer questions like:
Which products are my top sellers?
Who are my highest-value prospects?
Which marketing campaigns have been the most successful?
How satisfied are my customers?
All you need to do is choose your desired date and range from the dropdown boxes provided in the reporting dashboard, and the tool will build out custom reports:
Of course, if you want to go beyond these settings and create more advanced reports, you can. The dashboard gives you the tools to add custom formulas to your matrix and joined reports and even build your own reports using the report builder:
You can go as in-depth as you need to, but you actually don’t need to be a CRM expert to get super powerful reports out of the Salesforce dashboard. The tool is powerful enough to know what information your team needs to succeed.
Price: Depends on what you need and what you’re willing to pay (Salesforce is known for a la carte pricing). Still, a bare-bones package with basic reporting features starts at $25 a month.
Are you looking for a free CRM that also gives you reporting features?
HubSpot’s CRM builds valuable forecasting reports based on the revenue for deals in each stage of your deal pipeline. It calculates forecasts by deciphering the probability of a deal pulling through and how much it’s worth to your bottom line.
The CRM also gives sales teams a deep dive into their overall sales performance. You can download summaries of your team’s sales progress, showing which reps have been assigned to which prospects and how many of the created deals in your pipeline have actually been won.
A cool reporting feature from HubSpot is its rep leaderboard. This feature breaks down how many deals each rep has closed and how close they are to closing any new deals. If you’re looking to create a bit of healthy competition to push sales within your team, this is a unique way to do it!
The best part? The basic plan is free forever. However…
Price:In-depth reports are only accessible on paid plans. The Sales Hub Professional plan starts at $90 monthly per user and includes the standard sales report (available on the free plan), productivity reports, and a custom reporting dashboard. The Sales Hub Enterprise tier ($150 per month per user) includes all this and additional report customization options.
There are countless types of CRM reports out there, but not all of them are necessarily going to help you. However, there are a handful that you should be aware of. We’ll cover them below, examining each one and how it can help you.
1. Sales pipeline report
Almost any CRM with CRM reporting features should include a sales pipeline report. This type of report looks at your overall sales performance for a given period. It does so by examining metrics like conversion rate and the number of deals in each stage of your pipeline.
This report is valuable because it gives you a very basic, straightforward look at whether your marketing has been successful—more specifically, whether you’re earning revenue and, if so, how much.
You can use this report to help you see where your sales process is struggling so you can improve it. For example, you may see that your conversion rate is staggeringly low for a particular location. You can then revamp your marketing for that location to drive more sales.
2. New leads report
A new leads report looks at exactly what it sounds like—how many new leads you’re earning over a specified period. Driving leads is crucial because, without leads, you won’t have anyone to convert.
In addition to helping you monitor your lead volume (that is, how many leads you currently have in your pipeline), a new leads report lets you segment your leads to see how many leads you’re earning from each individual source.
A new leads report is great for insights into your top-of-funnel marketing effectiveness. Maybe you have a high sales rate, but you’re not generating many new leads. That tells you your bottom-of-funnel marketing is fine, but your top-of-funnel content needs more work.
3. Revenue forecast report
A revenue forecast report gives you a look at the amount of revenue you’re expected to earn in the near future based on your current metrics. Naturally, this measurement is only an estimate, but it’s still worth looking at when you’re trying to plan for your budget and sales going forward.
You can typically adjust revenue forecast reports based on how far ahead you want to predict and by confidence level. A high confidence level focuses only on the amount of revenue your CRM is confident you can earn, while a low confidence level also accounts for potential revenue that’s less certain.
Learning this information is a simple way to see if you’re on track to meet your revenue goals. If you’re expected to earn far less revenue than you’d planned, for instance, you’ll want to reevaluate your budget and probably revamp some of your marketing to drive more sales.
4. Losses report
Yet another vital type of CRM reporting feature is the losses report. A losses report shows you an overview of all the sales opportunities you’ve lost within a given time. That happens whenever a lead goes with a competitor or simply decides not to buy from you.
As disappointing as it is to look at all the sales you’ve missed out on, it can teach you quite a lot. These reports do more than simply show you how many sales you’ve lost—they show you why you’ve lost them.
You can segment your reports by groups to see which are most heavily affected. That will give you insights into what factors are causing you to lose sales—for instance, if most of your losses are happening around one particular product, you know you should assess the product’s weaknesses or its marketing.
5. Funnel report
A funnel report is similar to a standard sales pipeline report. However, the main difference is that a funnel report considers both sales and leads and emphasizes how those leads progress through your sales funnel.
To understand your campaigns’ effectiveness, you can easily segment funnel reports by different marketing funnel stages. For instance, compare the number of top-of-funnel leads you have versus the number of middle-of-funnel leads you have.
By examining different lead values, you can also assess the quality of those leads in addition to their quantity. Overall, this information lets you easily compare different stages of your funnel to see which campaigns are proving the most effective and which ones need work.
6. Activity report
An activity report allows you to evaluate team performance easily.
With Nutshell’s activity report, you can filter by users or teams, select the timeframe you’d like to report on and compare activity to previous timeframes. You can even set up quotas and goals for your team.
In addition, you can connect activities to outcomes like won or lost leads so your team can focus on actions that drive the best results.
Seamlessly save, share, and export activity reports to keep your team in the loop.
Key features to consider in CRM reporting
When sourcing a CRM solution for your organization, you want software that can support your sales, marketing, and customer support processes and provide in-depth reports for effective analysis. To ensure you invest in the best possible CRM system, consider the following integral reporting features:
One-click standard reports: Look for a CRM that offers clear analytical reports right out of the box and the ability to create more complex reports according to your needs.
Snapshot reports: Check whether the platform offers snapshot reports that give you a quick overview of trends and how your business is evolving over time.
Email reports: Modern CRM solutions like Nutshell include email marketing tools, which means you’ll need to draw email reports to see how leads and customers engage with the messages your team is sending out
Custom reports: Ensure your CRM lets you create custom reports that show you the metrics that are most important to you and that it supports SQL access for more advanced reporting.
App integrations: Find a CRM system that facilitates integrations with third-party analytics tools like Google Analytics, Google Ads, and other software important to your business to pool data from critical sources for comprehensive and accurate reporting.
Segments and filters: Your CRM should provide robust filtering and segmentation options, allowing you to zero in on specific data for further analysis.
Save and share: Make sure you can easily save your standard and custom reports and share them with colleagues and other stakeholders.
Download or export: The ability to download and export your reports into a spreadsheet for custom analysis is highly beneficial and something to look out for.
Looking for an easy-to-use CRM with all the features you need to boost sales?
When looking for a new CRM, you should always start by determining what your team needs the most. Does the software easily uncover the metrics that are most important to you?
If you’re all about forecasting and ensuring your team is hitting its targets, you may want to look for a CRM specializing in these features, like Copper. However, if you’re after a CRM that does a lot of the number-crunching for you and is completely customizable, a tool like Nutshell will be a better fit for your needs.
Not all CRMs are built the same. Some are super easy to use but lack the advanced tools a sales team needs to identify bottlenecks in their pipeline or see which reps are performing better than others. Take the time to figure out which CRM is the best fit for your reporting needs. After all, it’s a crucial tool that can supercharge your sales team’s success.
Pssst! Do you think Nutshell is the right CRM for your team? Take it for a test spin with our 14-day free trial! You’ll be able to explore our powerful CRM platform and discover if it’s the right fit for your company.
